TOPICS INCLUDE:
• Sound and video
• Access, privacy, and anonymity
• Agents on the desktop 
• New displays
• Speech recognition
• Long-term data storage 
• Mobile content/entertainment
• End-user produced content
• Visualization technologies 
• High-resolution photography 
• Digital output
CONFERENCE OVERVIEW
Technology innovation is no longer hatched purely in IT and R&D laboratories, and technology adoption has ceased to be a top-down process. What often drives business technology usage today are new waves of emerging technologies, such as the rising tide of consumer technologies propelled by vast economies of scale. Entertainment devices, cell phones, Blackberries, blogs, and iPods are no longer just the latest “cool” thing: they have emerged as essential, integral, and indispensable parts of our personal and organizational communications infrastructures. What the home entertainment industry provides (flat panel displays, for instance), IT consumes, as the two worlds continue to blur their boundaries.

We used to think 3G was expensive overkill as a mobile infrastructure, but maybe its time has come. The miniaturization of hardware components, like disk drives, and the integration of increasingly powerful devices (cameras, screens, health and bio sensors) will contribute to the on-going mobile (r)evolution of devices. Buildings are now routinely covered with LED video screens, and giant 100-million-pixel displays are on the way. With cell phones and the computer world increasingly intertwined, how soon can we expect speech synthesis on a computer to really sound like a person or a character? Once in place, and with voices and images as easily chosen as typefaces, is the notion of machines exhibiting a very strong, and very real, sense of personality a near-term reality?

This conference examines the emergence of technologies emanating from the realms of entertainment and mass communications, and explores their impact on organizational IT. We’ll ask what adoption models and cycles will impact the way we run our organizations in the future? We’ll look at what can we learn from the consumer, entertainment, leisure, and lifestyle industries about networks, streaming content, payment systems, and fraud protection.